Political commentary from the LA Times

Here is President Obama's Attorney Gen. Eric Holder offering more details about the capture and interrogation of Faisal Shahzad, the accused Times Square bomber, from the secure confines of the briefing room of Holder's own Justice Department in Washington.

The briefing room's main TV's are tuned to the top-rated cable news channel. Trouble is, that's the dreaded Fox News Channel that Obama aides including David Axelrod so weirdly picked a fight with last fall, castigating it as an alleged broadcast arm of the party of Abraham Lincoln, who never even owned a TV.

The public criticism of Fox no doubt went down well with the Democratic party's left for a few days. But it also backfired, boosting Fox's ratings, causing more people to watch as in: "Don't look over there, folks! That woman has no clothes on."

And those ratings ultimately showed that something on the order of a third of that network's viewers are, like Atty. Gen. Holder, Democrats who clearly want fair and balanced news.